Hey guys, We're just finishing up Episode 1 of our first gamebook, Star Breed. Star Breed is a Sci-Fi action gamebook spiced up with real-time mini games. We're very excited to share a gameplay trailer with you. Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Features: A mature, fast-paced story set in an original sci-fi universe Battle enemies and hack computer terminals in seamless, real-time mini-games (no dice Characters that converse with you and even join you on your adventure Intense atmosphere: Dynamic musical score and full page, color illustrations Intuitive gameplay; you dont have to have played a gamebook before! Would love to hear what you guys think. You can find out more on our website www.starbreedgame.com, or join our facebook page. UPDATE: August 29, 2010 A shot from the second chapter, where the horrific truth of the danger you're in finally dawns on you.
Thanks songbird. We're currently focused on getting the iPhone version out. Once that's done, we'll get a custom iPad version to take advantage of the iPad's size. Since we're doing real-time mini games for the battles and hacks, the iPad will be an interesting challenge for us but something we're excited to explore.
I wanted to share some more information with all of you about the unique experience of Star Breed. A lot of people get highly nostalgic when we talk about gamebooks. But there's an equally large audience out there that has never played a gamebook - who don't necessarily see the draw of gamebooks. So, when we started developing Star Breed, we wanted to re-imagine the presentation style and game mechanics for today's audience, while still retaining everything that we love about gamebooks ourselves. One of the earliest decisions we took towards this was to provide a continuous cinematic score throughout Star Breed. For this, we have implemented a Dynamic Music System that allows us to change the background music according to specific in-game events. This is not very different from what you see in bigger RPG titles like Mass Effect or Morrowind. Star Breed has several custom tracks to fit the varied moods and in-game events. This allows us to provide a thrilling and cinematic experience ... even while reading! So whether you're creeping down a dark tunnel, battling blood-thirsty creatures or running for your life across an apocalyptic landscape, the music of Star Breed will constantly shift to heighten your experience. I want to share one such track that we use for our Battle scenes Listen on youtube:
This sounds great, It sounds like you've made some nice changes to the usual Gamebook style. I can't wait to get my hands on this.
Thanks for the comments, guys! We're releasing the Battle Music MP3 as a free download. So, for all those who are interested, here's the link: Battle Music OST Preview - MP3
Hey guys! Beta for this is now currently on-going. I can tell you guys; for fans of the CYOA genre this is a game to be on your radar. It is A-MAZ-ING!!! Soi-Fong out!
Thanks for the kind words, guys. The beta is going smooth, with a lot of good feedback coming in. Meanwhile, for a taste of things to come, we'd like to share with you one of the full-screen chapter illustrations created exclusively for Star Breed. This is a shot from the second chapter, where the horrific truth of the danger you're in finally dawns on you. (You'll have to play it to know what that is ) We'll release more info and updates as we go. Meanwhile, enjoy the chapter shot - we hope you'll like it!
Looks like a must-buy for me. I hope it will deliver something really unique while staying true to the gamebook main virtue : telling a good well-written story.
Story and narrative style are definitely the top priority for us too and they get the most attention out of everything going into the game. All the other features we're adding are enhancements to heighten the experience. We've got dynamic music to immerse you into the story. We've got intense real time mini-games to set your pulse racing in battles. But the core of Star Breed is still a gripping, suspenseful story.
Modern games have raised our expectation of how responsive a game world should be to a player's actions. Even though Star Breed is text based, we're hoping to bring some of that vitality into this medium. I wanted to share with you what we're trying to do to capture that. Star Breed uses our custom content generation engine called "Dynamic Card Engine" - what we affectionately call - DyCE . DyCE does exactly what it sounds like it would do - it dynamically generates the page content based on a player's current and previous choices. When we do it at the microscopic level, it's almost invisible to first-time readers. For e.g., let's say you have to travel across a vast landing bay in the game, choosing either "a bike, a car or a truck". Once you've chosen your vehicle, a static page would typically say "You get on the vehicle and travel across the bay". With DyCE, here's what we can do: You get on the bike and zip across the bay, the harsh glare of the sun striking your face. When you reach the hangar, you hop off the bike and ... You get into the car and race across the bay, the radio blaring static. When you reach the hangar, you climb out of the car and You climb into the truck and roar across the bay, knowing that you're safe within its shielded metal cabin. When you reach the hangar, you get down and ... It's deliberately subtle, but it keeps the reader completely immersed in the story since we can now customize the entire book, based on each player action. And, it gets a lot more fun when we use this on a macroscopic level . As you play through Star Breed, other characters will join you on your journey and fight along with you. They'll be watching your actions in the game - sometimes they'll agree, sometimes they'll disagree, but no matter what, they'll always remember what you did. And all of this is dynamically generated based on each individual choice that you make in the game. Yes ... imagine the possibilities
I'm impressed! Can't wait to see more as now I'm wondering about these minigames as well. Anyway, I'm excited about the apparent attention to detail going on with the choice-generated content, sounds really cool and definitely full of possibilities...
@medianotzu We'll be showing more about the mini games too very soon, so stay tuned! @Gavaphone We would love to release Star Breed in more languages. Unfortunately, we're still a very small indie studio and we don't have that kinda resources yet. It's not like a casual game that needs only the menu and help files to be translated (which itself is pretty hard for an indie). Star Breed is an entire book worth of translation - 30,000+ words of translation! That's way beyond what we can do right now. Well ... we do hope Star Breed will be a big enough success to allow us to do such translations though
I'm really impressed and intriguided by the Dyce system. It opens a whole lot of possibilities and really gives an opportunity to benefit from the the fact that the gamebook is made for a machine and not a physical book. However, how do you manage to get a constant quality of writing? will you test every possible combination and rewrite those that dyce messed up? Or does it not mess up, ever ?
DyCE is a database driven content engine, not an AI system - so unlike Skynet, DyCE is actually quite obedient and never messes up . But seriously we're database driven, so our gamebook author first writes all possible phrases into the game and links it up to the different choice patterns throughout the game. Then, based on the choice a player makes; DyCE will refer the database, pick the appropriate phrase and finally generate the page. It might sound complex, but we have some very powerful in-house tools that make it extremely easy for our author to link this up. The narrative style is one of our top priorities too, so all this will be very seamless to the reader. In fact, most people won't even know it's happening until their second playthrough!
